Back in the arctic as a child, I would spend quite a bit of time looking down at the gently curving horizon from one of my dad’s airplanes. He was a bush pilot and with my mom owned a fleet of about a dozen aircraft. The vastness of the arctic is frightening. Looking down at the patchwork of lakes, trees, muskeg and rock that extend as far as one can see is similar to staring out over the ocean. I guess the Alberta Tar sands might be something akin to the great pacific garbage patch then….Though I would occasionally go fishing on one of those lakes my main environment, the one where I knew people lived or were seemingly supposed to live, was a miniature model of pretty much any other north American town or city. Laid out on a grid pattern, square and rectangular houses, places to work in one area, places to shop in another area, places to live in their own area and so on. Neat, organized and predictable. Aside from the temperature that orderly little town shared little with the wild sprawling taiga and tundra that it was surrounded by, which at 11 years old seemed to extend to the corners of the earth. That was an ancient abyss from which one could walk out into and never return. The world seemed unthinkably large to me back then. A few trips overseas and a geography degree later, the world seems almost clausterphobically small and intimate. Like many others I’m sure that “out there” now seems alarmingly close, as “here” grows from local to global in scale. I feel that Pacific Garbage Patch drifting slowly towards me. I sense the tainted groundwater is trickling in my direction…and I have to do something.